Chimaeron

Hello, and welcome to Tankspot's Cataclysm Raid Guide. My name is Papapaint, and in this video I will be discussing the strategy for Chimaeron in the Blackwing Descent Raid Instance.

Chimaeron is an extremely healer-intense fight, and requires a great deal of self control on the part of your healing team--you won't be seeing very many satisfyingly full green bars.

It is important to note that you should not begin the fight by simply hitting Chimaeron in the face. Instead, go around him and speak with Finkle Einhorn, locked in a cage next to his trusty Bile-O-Tron. After speaking with him, the Bile-O-Tron comes online, stinks up the room, and wakes up the napping triple-headed monster. As long as the Bile-O-Tron is active, your raid gains Finkle's Mixture, which prevents any members of your raid dying as long as their health is over 10,000. If a raider's health is over 10,000 and they WOULD die, they're instead knocked down to 1 HP.

In simpler terms, this means that during Phase 1, your raiders' health only needs to be over 10,000 HP---healing them past that is essentially overhealing. This is due to Chimaeron's Caustic Slime. This move will target four players, splitting 320,000 damage (two players and 280,000 in 10-man) between those players and all other players within 6 yards of them. In addition, it will apply a debuff to all affected players, reducing their hit for 3 seconds. The easiest way to deal with this is to split up, staying 6 yards apart--any player hit by the green vomit will simply be knocked down to 1 HP. Heal them to over 10k HP, and they're safe once again.

The exception to the 10,000 HP rule is, of course, the tanks. Chimaeron hits hard, and has two extra-nasty abilities to look out for: Break and Double Attack. Double Attack is exactly what it sounds like--on Chimaeron's next melee, he will melee twice in very quick succession. This means that even if your tank is over 10k, they will be hit, reducing them to 1 HP, and then hit immediately afterwards, killing them. There are a few ways to deal with this. Defensive cooldowns work well, but topping off the tank will generally allow them to survive the double hit. Break is designed to make topping off the tank more difficult--it increases the damage taken by the tank by 25% and reducing ihealing taken by 15% for every stack. This is applied every 15-20 seconds, so you'll want to have your tanks trade off every 3 stacks, with your tank popping cooldowns to survive through the 2nd stack.

The last ability of note during phase 1 is Massacre. Massacre instantly deals 900,000 damage to every player and can not be mitigated in any way. This means that every single player in your raid over 10,000 HP will be reduced to 1 HP, and all raiders below 10,000 HP will die instantly. This includes the tank, so make sure you have at least one--preferably more--healers dedicated to healing up the tank as quickly as possible while the rest of your healers rush to get everyone in the raid back over 10,000 HP.

Occasionally after Massacre, the Bile-O-Tron will be knocked offline, removing the buff from your raid and taking you into phase 2. During phase 2, Chimaeron's heads will begin fighting one another, and he will cast fued for 30 seconds. You have 15 seconds to stack up and heal the entire raid before he begins vomiting poison bombs. Without the buff to protect your raid members, it's necessary to clump up in order to split the damage amongst your whole raid. After 15 seconds, he will vomit every 5 seconds, then finish off with another massacre. Use defensive cooldowns, self heals, and help top off all raid members in any way possible. While he casts Massacre, your raid should be spreading out to resume Phase One.

At 20%, Chimaeron will take your raid into Phase 3. During phase 3, your whole raid will be afflicted with a new debuff: Mortality. This reduces ALL healing effects on your raid by 99%... so there's basically no reason to continue healing. In addition, Chimaeron will become untauntable and take an additional 10% damage. To simplify the strategy of phase 3... BURN HIM DOWN. Pop Heroism or Bloodlust, have your healers help out with DPSing, and start kiting him. Watch his aggro table to determine who he's going to attack next, and have that person run across the room. Use Iceblocks, Bubbles, Fades, Feign Deaths, Guardian Spirit, and any other tricks you can think of to keep him running as much as possible. The more he's moving instead of attacking, the more DPS time you get. This is purely a race against his ability to nom nom your entire raid, one at a time. With proper cooldown usage, some hard DPS, and clever use of aggro mechanics, Chimaeron should be an exhilarating kill.

Thanks for watching this guide. I will include the second half of this fight with some minor commentary to give you a better idea of how we handled all three phases. If you enjoyed this guide and would like to stay up-to-date on Cataclysm raid strategy information, subscribe to this video channel. As usual, comments are welcome in both the youtube comment box and on the official thread on Tankspot.

Twilight Ascendant Council

Hello and welcome to the TankSpot Bastion of Twilight Raid Guide! My name is Aliena, and in this video I'll show you everything you have to know about the Ascendant Council, the third encounter in this new raid instance. We completed this fight with 2 tanks, 6 healers and 17 DPS, but similar raid configurations may work just as well.

The council is a three-phase encounter and you face a total of 5 opponents. In the first phase, you're up against Ignacious, a fire elemental Ascendant Lord, and Feludius, an ice elemental Ascendant Lord. In the second phase, you face off against Arion, who's an air elemental Ascendant Lord and Terrastra, an earth elemental Ascendant Lord. In the third phase, all four entities combine into an Elementium Monstrosity, which combines all four elements in one.

While the first two phases require near perfect execution, the third phase is definitely a soft enrage DPS test. As soon as one Lord in both phase 1 & 2 hits 25%, you'll trigger the next phase, but you want to make sure both Lords are equally low before doing this each time, as the Elementium Monstrosity starts out with a combined amount of health of all four lords. In short, getting all four Lords as close to 25% as you can gives you the best chance of defeating this encounter.

Ignacious and Feludius will be your first opponents, and as you can probably tell as soon as you engage them, their abilities are meant to counter each other. Ignacious should be tanked on one side of the room, surrounded by a tank and melee, while Feludius should be tanked away from the raid, with ranged raid members loosely spread out across the room.

This is because of one of Feludius' abilities - Glaciate, which deals Frost damage to your entire raid but deals less damage the further away you are from him. As such, your ranged raid members should be assigned to DPS him while your melee are safe on Ignacious.

You'll soon notice that each Lord occasionally puts a debuff on random raid members - Feludius has Heart of Ice and Ignacious has Burning Blood. These deal increasing damage to the target but are very vital to the fight, as they give nearby raid members a buff that increases their damage done to the opposing Lord. Players with Burning Blood should make sure to run through the ranged raid members to give them increased damage on Feludius, and players with Heart of Ice need to join the melee pile to give them increased damage on Ignacious. These can be dispelled, but you should give it 10-20 seconds before doing so.

Heart of Ice is especially important whenever Ignacious is about to cast his most devastating ability - Aegis of Flame. This gives him a shield that absorbs a million damage and he'll start channeling Rising Flames, which deals increasing fire damage to every raid member. To interrupt Rising Flames, his shield needs to be burned down asap. Letting too many ticks of rising Flames go off can easily result in a raid wipe. If needed, have ranged help out with the shield, but make sure they go right back to Feludius afterwards so you bring their health down equally.

Ignacious will also occasionally leap at a ranged target, which knocks everyone around the impact point away. On his way back to his tank, he'll leave a trail of flame on the ground. While I always preach not to stand in the flames, this one is actually USEFUL. This is why: Feludius has a Waterbomb ability, which basically looks like small water missiles flying through the air. When they hit a raid member, he'll get a Waterlogged debuff which reduces movement speed.

Running through Ignacious' flame trail clears the waterlogged debuff and NEEDS to be done by everyone affected. Shortly after casting the Waterbombs, Feludius will cast aforementioned Glaciate, and any player that still has a Waterlogged debuff at that time will get frozen in an ice block and take extreme amounts of damage. This is healable, but it's not something you want to happen.

Feludius' last ability is Hydrolance, which deals big single target damage to a random target and should be interrupted. Make sure your ranged raid members and the Feludius tank watch out for this. Ignacious' last ability is Flame Torrent, which is a channeled cone AoE spell that deals major damage. To counter this, don't be in front of his face unless you're the tank.

To recap: In phase 1, interrupt Rising Flames by burning down the Aegis,power up your raid members appropriately by running near them when you have a debuff and clear Waterlogged debuff by running through the flame trail. Once you get one Lord to 25%, the next phase will trigger. It's vital that both Lords hit 25% at about the same time.

Phase 2 will greet you with Arion and Terrastra, which also have mechanics that counter each other. Ranged raid members are more effective on Arion, as he likes to teleport around the room, so leave your melee on Terrastra. As soon as the fight starts, Arion will summon a cyclone that'll move through the room and Terrastra will summon a gravity well. Hitting the cyclone will give you a sort of levitate, while standing in the gravity well will give you a grounded debuff and clear your levitate.

Both of these are very important as both Arion and Terrastra have very devastating ultimate abilities that deal about 100k damage. They'll alternate in casting these about once per minute. Terrastra has Quake, which can be countered by getting Levitate from the cyclone and Arion has Thundershock, which is cancelled by getting grounded from the gravity well. If you don't have the right debuff at the time either of these are cast, you're very likely to die. The wells and cyclones are summoned in random spots around the room and like to move on top of each other, so make sure to get the appropriate debuff early. They always alternate in their casts - so if you just survived a Quake, get grounded to survive the impending Thunderstorm.

There's one exception to the "get the debuff as soon as possible"-rule, and it's called Lightning Rod. Arion will randomly bestow 3 players with this debuff, and they'll have a yellow arrow over their heads. Players with Lightning Rods need to get out of the raid immediately and hug a wall away from anyone else, since Arion will cast Chain Lightning at anyone affected with Lightning Rod after 15 seconds. If any Lightning Rod is still near people at that time, you'll probably have a few deaths.

If you have Lightning Rod and it comes down to having the choice between being near anyone else or not getting your appropriate grounded or levitate debuff, always leave the raid. You can survive a Quake or Thundershock, but if you're firing off a Chain Lightning in the raid, there will be deaths.

Almost as important is Terrastra's Harden Skin ability, which makes him deal double damage and take half damage. This cast can and should be interrupted whenever possible, but if you fail to do so, have your ranged help out on Terrastra to burn his shield down. Lastly, Terrastra will occasionally cast Eruption, which will look like a few spikes burrowing in the ground, and after a few seconds the spikes will impale anyone still in the area for about 50k. Melee should be aware of this, although it's not the end of the world to get hit by it.

Again, the goal in phase two is to bring both Lords to 25% at the same time. If you execute this right, your Elementium Monstrosity should rise up with about 25% health left, which translates to approximately 18 million health.

Phase 3 is the burn phase and any kind of bloodlust should be saved for this. The Monstrosity will consistently spawn water puddles at his feet that kinda work like Defile on the Lich King, except the puddles expand when the Monstrosity stands in them, not your raid members. Aim to keep the Monstrosity towards the middle of the room so your casters don't have to consistently move to keep up with it. The middle area will be covered in puddles at the end, but that way you get the most DPS on it.

Throughout the whole phase, the Monstrosity will use Electric Instability, which is basically a chain lightning that deals more damage the longer the phase goes on. Eventually, your raid will just die to this, so you need to kill the Monstrosity before Electric Instability becomes overwhelming.

It has two more abilities that it'll use occasionally - Lava Seed and Gravity Crush. Lava Seed looks like little flares of fire hitting the ground, and shortly after they do so they'll explode in a little fire patch. This is the bad kinda fire. Don't stand in it.

Gravity Crush will lift 3 players up into the air and trap them in a gravity bubble. They cannot act during this and will take major damage in the bubble, so healers need to concentrate on them. When released, they'll fall to the ground and also take fall damage when they hit it. It's easy to let people die in this but important not to, with current gear level you need every bit of DPS you can get.

If you have enough DPS to defeat the Monstrosity before your raid collapses, it's more or less a tank&spank phase. This might sound like a complex encounter, but since the abilities all play off of each other, it'll be a lot easier once you engage it. Good luck and have fun!